


but if colors loved me

by doomcountry



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Implied Sexual Content, M/M, POV Second Person, Set in Episodes 159-160 | Scottish Safehouse Period (The Magnus Archives), Synesthesia, The Lonely - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:07:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27443146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomcountry/pseuds/doomcountry
Summary: You assume, at first, that all of Martin’s colors are pale by nature.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 17
Kudos: 163





	but if colors loved me

You assume, at first, that all of Martin’s colors are pale by nature. His soft _hi_ in the hallway a yellow-white, your name on his lips a sort of crushed robin’s-egg. When the change first became apparent to you, when you stepped out of the hospital to the sound of the city and its accompanying crush of color against your mind, you began immediately to see the patterns: Basira’s shades of green, lightening in hue when her words turned to Daisy; Melanie’s vivid oranges and neon pinks. You had assumed that, when you saw him again, you would encounter a vibrance—Martin, after all, high-strung and emotional. You had imagined his tones to be jeweled, rich, or airy and soft, flighty and nervous. You had been looking forward to it.

But he is all pastels when you see him, and perhaps you were wrong, you think. Maybe he has always been these dull and dusty shades. You wouldn’t have known before.

He walks away from you without looking back. You wonder what else you are wrong about.

* * *

He sleeps most of the trip north, his head tipped against the cold car window. Ostensibly you are meant to be trading off driving, but he is so tired, still moving so slowly, as if his limbs are sore, his joints stiff. You don’t want to wake him. It rains, and when you pull over for a moment to stretch your legs, before you leave the car you sit and look at him for a while, his breath condensing on the window, his dark eyelashes splayed across his cheek.

You want to kiss him on that cheek, or just reach out and take his hand. Instead you close your eyes in the silence of the pattering rain and narrow in on his breathing, soft and even. Against the backs of your eyelids it sounds lavender, the palest possible lavender, the barest ghost of purple. You open them again, and the color remains, like a fog at the edges of your vision.

There’s a loosening in your chest, as if your lungs have unwound a little. You breathe in and out with him. Your head feels cottony still; like a shell pressed to your ear you think you can still hear, hallucinatory, the distant sound of waves, ice-blue in your mouth. No thought except to get yourself somewhere safe with him—it’s all you can do.

Back on the road, on a long straight stretch, you reach out and take his hand. It’s cold, worryingly so, but he’s still breathing those gusts of lavender, still curled up in the seat. He’s still here with you.

* * *

The change is slow, but you see it. You cannot help but see it. You lean over the sagging sofa to whisper good mornings to him where he is curled up under his coat, and he stirs, makes a muffled sound of sleep, and it’s mauve, so mauve it startles you, though it’s still a weak and shadowy hue, flits away from you as soon as you catch it.

Martin, you say, feeling an unaccountable jump of your heart. You hadn’t known he had that color in him.

He opens one eye, finally, and sees you. Closes it again and smiles, the bleary smile of someone not quite awake or aware, turning his face toward the back of the sofa, cuddling his coat against him.

Morning, he mumbles. It’s mauve, too. Just a tangle, a shred. You wish you could taste it. Catch it like a butterfly. Is it time to get up?

You sit down gently on the cushion in the space left behind his knees. You look down at his beat-up trainers, laces undone, trailing over the edge of the stained upholstery. A little sliver of his grey sock showing.

Sleep a little longer, you say, softly, awed. It’s okay.

* * *

You’ve known Martin a long time, you realize, as the days go. As you settle against each other in Daisy’s house, sweeping the floors, ironing the curtains, putting the paltry boxes you salvaged from your flats in neat pyramids in the spare room. As you make the long walk to the village, to the shops, grocery list in hand. Still body-shy around each other, still hesitant to brush too close, still too tired to talk about it properly. But it’s comfortable. You have always felt a sort of comfort with Martin, looking back, whether you wanted to admit it at the time or not. He had been so cold to you before the Lonely. You had mused on his sharp, stark shades for months. Wondering if you had gotten him wrong somehow, read too far into things, fooled yourself. His laughter had been so blank and textureless. Empty air. The underside of a thundercloud, a spectrum of greys and watercolors.

His laughter is yellow now. Pale like rainy-day sunshine in his little scoffs and chuckles, marigold when he finds something really funny, when his laugh is loud and long. Visiting the docile cows down the road, you hear him give a startled, yelping laugh when one nudges his hand with its cold, wet nose, and it’s the loveliest goldenrod you’ve ever seen. You want to make him do that again.

After supper he builds up the fire in the hearth and you read to him, passages here and there from the six or seven books that make up the entirety of Daisy’s library. He hums little snatches of cardinal red at particular turns of phrase. He folds himself onto the sofa next to you and nestles his head into the crook of your shoulder and often dozes off like that, warm and heavy against you, still lavender. Stronger lavender now.

You don’t know if he would understand the relief you feel, if you told him what you saw when he spoke, laughed, hummed. Swore under his breath at a mistake in the kitchen (coffee-brown). Sang a verse of something under the sputtering shower-head, unaware that you were listening (rosy pink). Every day he smiles a little easier. Every day he gets a little brighter.

* * *

Every day he struggles, too. He’s evening out. Figuring out how to be Martin, solid and true, again. You’re as patient as you can be, but you aren’t perfect.

You make him angry one morning, though you don’t mean to. You hear the shower turn off but he doesn’t come back to bed, the bed you share without discussion, the way he usually does. ( _Usually._ A funny word for a two-week span, but it heartens you.) You find him with his arms braced against the sink, looking heartbroken into the mirror, where the soft yellow light overhead illuminates the roots of his hair, growing in stark white.

What’s wrong? you ask, though you know already, and he tugs despairingly on a lock of his hair, tears filling his eyes.

I don’t know what happened, he says, voice breaking. What happened? I thought—

Though you both know already, that the Lonely is pale, sinister, grows up through you like an albino plant beneath a stone, whether you know it or not, whether you’ve killed it or not.

I think it looks beautiful, you say, and it’s the truth, which is the wrong thing.

His rage is a blue so dark it is almost black. It isn’t _beautiful_ , he shouts, suddenly, startling you. It’s horrible—I don’t understand—I thought—words fail him; his face is red; he moves and accidentally tips over the glass in which you have both been storing your toothbrushes and it shatters on the floor. He covers his face with his hands and makes an aborted sound, a weak scream of anger. He grabs at his hair and yanks it. The whole room feels hazy, bloody, necrotic. You fear he will tear it out if he’s not careful.

You’re on the floor with him, his hot face buried in your neck, slamming his fist weakly over and over against your thigh in impotent frustration. It hurts, but it doesn’t matter. You don’t try to hush him, rock him, kiss him, tell him you’re sorry. He knows. The points at which his fingers dig into your back are incandescent, white-hot. He is so irrationally, deeply, furiously angry, spitting mad, true, actual, feeling it with every atom of his body. You have never been so proud of him.

* * *

The gasp of excitement he makes when a bird lands on the feeder by the porch. Candy-orange. The sigh when he relaxes fully on the sofa beside you, his body going lax and loose. Grass-green. The rustle of sheets, the sound of contentment when he turns over in bed. Wash of silver. The taut exhale when he sits up in the morning to stretch his arms above his head. Wave-teal. The stamp of his feet in his beat-up trainers when he sprints down the road to say hello to the sheep at the crossing. Summer day-blue. The hiss and resounding _fuck_ when he stubs his toe against the corner of the wall, in the same damn spot, every damn day. Amber, fizzy and textured.

The sound he makes when you kiss him, when he sighs and leans in, the sound that comes from the back of his throat. Millennial pink, soft and lovely, the most satisfying color in the world.

The sound he makes when he comes, hand moving between his legs, pressed against you, the little cut-off noises he breathes against your throat, while you stroke his cheek and tell him that he’s good, he’s so wonderful, periwinkle blue, vivid and sure, scattering in the breeze from the open window.

The first time he tells you that he loves you, it’s a gentle dark coral. The color of an old book binding, something hidden away on a shelf with care. Crackling, comforting, familiar.

* * *

Would he understand, you wonder, if you told him? It isn’t like the other things the Eye has given you. Fear has color, too, but it’s nothing like his color. Doesn’t hold a candle to his color. He is the brightest thing in the world. He takes up the whole sky with his marigold laughter. You keep your eyes open near him until they ache and grow dry for fear of missing any single shade of him.

Someday, if all goes well in the world, he tells you he wants to take up crochet, or something else handy and domestic. He says it shyly, as if it’s embarrassing, but you understand the urge, to make yourself useful like that. You yourself have imagined a quilt. Something to make, piece by piece, when the both of you are old and your bones creak when you move, when there is nothing to do but sit on the porch of Daisy’s house and soak in the sun. Hundreds of pieces of fabric in all his colors, but his coral most of all.


End file.
